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Health, Reproductive Rights & Sexuality

Full equality for women and girls can be attained only when they have the information and services they need to lead healthy lives and make informed and independent decisions about their health, reproductive health and sexuality. Health for women depends on many factors, including access to safe water and nutritious food; affordable care and insurance; disease prevention and access to comprehensive reproductive and maternal health services; and awareness and support for women with HIV/AIDS and other diseases and disabilities. Health is not limited to physical well-being but extends to sexuality, mental health and body image as well.
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Cancer screening has been a contentious issue in recent years. Even by government-backed U.S. Preventative Services Task Force (USPSTF) standards, which some consider to be relatively conservative, screening rates for breast and cervical cancer were low in the study. Only about half of women in the Oregon-based research met USPSTF recommendations.

"People in rural areas tend to go to the doctor only when they are ill, so they don't get the chance to talk about cancer screenings," said Dr. Patricia Carney, a researcher at Oregon Health and Science University, Portland, who led the study.

Previous studies have shown that screening rates are lower among the uninsured, but that research has focused on people in towns and cities.

For the new study, partially funded by the American Cancer Society (ACS), researchers analyzed a decade of medical charts at two private health practices, and two federally funded public health centers in rural Oregon. The study included more than 3,000 men and women, all aged 55 or over when the study began.

They found that about 10 percent of patients lacked insurance coverage. Those with coverage had either private insurance, or a combination of private insurance, Medicare and Medicaid. The insurance status of about 16 percent of patients was unknown.

According to the report in the journal Cancer, people with private insurance were much more likely to be up-to-date for some ACS recommended cancer screenings than people without insurance.

While 56 percent of women with insurance went without recommended mammograms, which the ACS recommends beginning at age 40, 78 percent of uninsured women, and 70 percent of those with Medicare or Medicaid, did.

Researchers find that, all other things equal, female physicians still make approximately $12,000 per year less than their male counterparts.

Editorial:

Context It is unclear whether male and female physician researchers who perform similar work are currently paid equally.

Objectives To determine whether salaries differ by gender in a relatively homogeneous cohort of physician researchers and, if so, to determine if these differences are explained by differences in specialization, productivity, or other factors.

Design and Setting A US nationwide postal survey was sent in 2009-2010 to assess the salary and other characteristics of a relatively homogeneous population of physicians. From all 1853 recipients of National Institutes of Health (NIH) K08 and K23 awards in 2000-2003, we contacted the 1729 who were alive and for whom we could identify a mailing address.

Participants The survey achieved a 71% response rate. Eligibility for the present analysis was limited to the 800 physicians who continued to practice at US academic institutions and reported their current annual salary.

Results The mean salary within our cohort was $167 669 (95% CI, $158 417-$176 922) for women and $200 433 (95% CI, $194 249-$206 617) for men. Male gender was associated with higher salary (+$13 399; P = .001) even after adjustment in the final model for specialty, academic rank, leadership positions, publications, and research time. Peters-Belson analysis (use of coefficients derived from regression model for men applied to women) indicated that the expected mean salary for women, if they retained their other measured characteristics but their gender was male, would be $12 194 higher than observed.

Conclusion Gender differences in salary exist in this select, homogeneous cohort of mid-career academic physicians, even after adjustment for differences in specialty, institutional characteristics, academic productivity, academic rank, work hours, and other factors.

Hundreds of thousands of women at risk for irregular heart rhythms have a small, battery-powered gadget embedded in their chests. The implantable cardioverter defibrillator (ICD) can be a lifesaver, shocking a dangerously fast heartbeat back to normal.Yet the actual benefit to women is uncertain, because ICDs were approved by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) based on clinical trials made up mostly of men. That's typical of testing of many high-risk devices, according to medical reports. And even in the clinical device trials that do include women, generally the outcomes aren't reported by sex.

The result is a critical gap in the data doctors rely on when making decisions about a treatment's benefits and risks for women. It can also pose troubling dilemmas later on, said cardiologist Rita F. Redberg, a professor of medicine at the University of California, San Francisco. That was the case in 2009, when data pooled from clinical trials showed that ICDs were no better than drugs at reducing a woman's risk of death.

"The time to collect data in both sexes is before FDA approval," said Redberg. "Especially with implanted devices, where there's no going back."

Only recently has the FDA proposed guidelines to improve the representation of women in clinical device trials. Intended for the medical device industry, which sponsors most of the research submitted for review, the guidelines are expected to become final by year's end. Similar standards for drug testing were put in place some 20 years ago, following a long period during which women of childbearing age were explicitly excluded from most studies.

In practice, the vast majority of medical devices reviewed by the FDA are cleared for use without human testing if they are deemed "substantially equivalent" to devices already on the market. Only 1 percent of devices undergo rigorous review and clinical trials before they can be marketed.

Even so, the new guidelines for device trials are an important advance, experts say. The proposed FDA guidelines are nonbinding, however, and some experts who favor the new recommendations are skeptical that the medical device industry will comply.

"Industry is always most attentive to the bottom line," said Christine Carter, vice president for scientific affairs at the Society for Women's Health Research (SWHR) in Washington. "So companies will continue to lament that trials are expensive and that recruiting more women is a problem." Device makers will change their study protocols just enough to meet FDA requirements, Carter predicted, but protocols will be "less than ideal for those of us concerned with sex differences and women's health."

The Associated Press reports that thousands of demonstrators on Sunday staged the largest protest yet against plans by Turkey's Islamic-rooted government to curb abortion, which critics say will amount to a virtual ban.

Around 3,000 women - their ages ranging from 20 to 60 years old - gathered at a square in Istanbul's Kadikoy district. Some carried banners that read "my body, my choice" and shouted anti-government slogans.

Many of the women were accompanied by husbands and boyfriends. One young protester - her left fist clenched aloft - carried a placard that read "State, take your hands off my body," while a man waved a slogan reading "My darling's body, my darling's choice."

Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan has called abortion "murder," and his government is reportedly working on legislation to ban the operation after 4 weeks from conception, except in emergencies.

Fusun Sirkeci, a London-based obstetrician and gynecologist, said in an email Saturday that most women don't learn they are pregnant until after 4 weeks and it is also difficult to establish the placement of the pregnancy sac during that period.

Researchers at the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention found that several factors influenced whether mothers of newborns would stick to their plan to breastfeed only, including actions by hospital staff in the first hours and days after delivery.

"We do know the hospitals have an important role to play. It's certainly a short period of time, but it's a very critical period of time," said Cria Perrine, a CDC epidemiologist who led the study.

To find out what hospitals can do, and what they should avoid, to help promote breastfeeding, Perrine and her colleagues used information from an existing study that followed more than 3,000 pregnant women between 2005 and 2007.

The women were all over 18 years old, were pregnant for at least 35 weeks and gave birth to a child who weighed at least five pounds. Participants answered at least 11 questionnaires over the course of one year, starting while they were still pregnant.

At that time, 1792 women (60 percent) who completed the questionnaires said they planned to exclusively breastfeed their babies for some period of time, ranging from several weeks to seven months or more.

Of these, the majority (85 percent) planned to breastfeed for three months or more.

But whatever their intended breastfeeding period, only 32 percent actually met their goal.

A study out of the University of Hawaii at Mānoa, The University of Manchester and Monash University and published in the journal Obesity, finds that anti-fat prejudice still persists against formerly obese women, even after they had lost a significant amount of weight.

Overweight women face a multitude of hardships – such as discrimination in the workplace – that arise from the stigma surrounding obesity. While weight loss may seem like the solution for women hoping to escape anti-fat prejudice, it may not be that simple after all.

New research out of the University of Hawaii at Mānoa, The University of Manchester and Monash University, has revealed that anti-fat prejudice still persisted against former obese women, even after they had lost a significant amount of weight.

“Previous research has shown that the harmful nature of obesity stigma crossed many domains,” Dr. Janet Latner, the study’s lead author at the University of Hawaii at Mānoa, told FoxNews.com. “So we designed an experiment to look at whether obesity sting persisted once the weight had been dropped.”

Published in the journal Obesity, the study asked young men and women participants to read various stories about a woman who had lost about 70 pounds, or a woman who was currently obese or thin who had remained stable. The participants were then asked to rate the women’s attractiveness and then give their opinions on fat people in general.

Findings published in the Journal of Clinical Oncology found that of nearly 500 cancer survivors aged 18 to 45, 80 percent of men surveyed said their doctor had told them their chemotherapy could affect their future fertility.

But only 48 percent of women said the same. In addition, only 14 percent of women said they received information on options to preserve their fertility, versus 68 percent of men.

The gap is likely related to the fact that preserving fertility is more complicated in women than men and techniques for doing so are not as widely available, said the researchers.

This report uses data collected by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, the Massachusetts Department of Public Health, and the U.S. Census Bureau to evaluate the likely impact of the Massachusetts Act Establishing Earned Paid Sick Time. The study is one of a series of analyses by the Institute for Women’s Policy Research (IWPR) examining the costs and benefits of paid sick days policies. It estimates how much time off Massachusetts workers would use under the proposed policy and the costs to employers for that sick time. It also uses findings from previous peer-reviewed research to estimate how this leave policy would save money, by reducing turnover, cutting down on the spread of disease at work, helping employers avoid paying for low productivity, holding down nursing-home stays, and reducing norovirus outbreaks in nursing homes.

This report uses data collected by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, the Massachusetts Department of Public Health, and the U.S. Census Bureau to evaluate the likely impact of the Massachusetts Act Establishing Earned Paid Sick Time. The study is one of a series of analyses by the Institute for Women’s Policy Research (IWPR) examining the costs and benefits of paid sick days policies. It estimates how much time off Massachusetts workers would use under the proposed policy and the costs to employers for that sick time. It also uses findings from previous peer-reviewed research to estimate how this leave policy would save money, by reducing turnover, cutting down on the spread of disease at work, helping employers avoid paying for low productivity, holding down nursing-home stays, and reducing norovirus outbreaks in nursing homes.

A new nationally representative survey from the Guttmacher Institute shows that the national network of publicly funded family planning clinics—which helps millions of women avoid unintended pregnancies and plan the timing of wanted pregnancies—gives women vital access to contraceptive and other preventive care, according to "Variation in Service Delivery Practices Among Clinics Providing Publicly Funded Family Planning Services in 2010," by Jennifer Frostet al. More than half of publicly funded clinics (54%) reported offering their clients at least 10 of 13 reversible contraceptive methods in 2010, an increase from 35% in 2003. Many offer on-site provision of the most widely used contraceptives and have implemented protocols to make it easier for women to initiate and continue use of their chosen method.